Clive Matson is more than a legendary Beat poet. He's a little bit younger than the Beats, and a lot more honest and raw, which he'll tell you himself.

He's a nature lover, a teacher and a father. And on Monday, June 15, he will be teaching a free public workshop entitled "Let the Crazy Child Inside Write" at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

Poets Q.R. Hand and H.D. Moe will also be reading at the event, which begins at 6 p.m. Matson plans to read from his heralded 1966 poetry collection Mainline to the Heart, along with some more recent works.

When Mainline was published, it was described by one reviewer as "more edgy than the Beats," a critique Matson agrees with.

"I'm carried away either by angst, the pain of what I see, or just the urge to figure out what is going on in the world," Matson said. "Writing is a healing journey, an adventure that takes you places that you'd never expect to go."

It was this attitude that took Matson from an avocado farm in Southern California to the University of Chicago on a full scholarship. Dropping out only two years later, he hitchhiked around Europe for a year before settling in Lower East Side New York.

There he became associated with the Beat Generation writers, wrote poetry and dabbled in drugs. After kicking his drug habit, Matson kept writing essays, poetry and fiction, eventually becoming a teacher in 1978.

In 1998 he published Let The Crazy Child Inside Write, a book about teaching writing. Its thesis says that the source of our writing is an internal "creative psychic passion."

Since he began teaching, Matson has enjoyed watching many of his students become published writers. He's even held writing retreats in the jungles of Costa Rica and at a former student's house in Italy.

An upcoming retreat into the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains will position his workshop at 7,500-feet high during the same time as the Perseid Meteor Shower on Aug. 7.

"I invite anyone to come and join us on that journey, it's healing and growth producing," he said of his workshops.

"People can get in touch with strong passion, feelings, and write quite a bit of raw material, opening a door to the power in our bodies and psyches," Matson said of Monday's workshop. "It doesn't matter whether you think you're a poet, an essayist, or a journalist. Even just having an inkling to do some writing, it will work for you."

The Sacramento Poetry Center is located at 1719 25th St.

*Images courtesy Clive Matson